2001–2007 | Lack & Longing

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Editor’s note: I love collecting photobooks and have long wanted to share the best of them in a column called Richard’s Bookshelf. For one thing, these books reveal currents in international photography quite unlike the prevailing tastes in our own circles, and they deserve discussion. For another, writing about them requires a great deal of extra reading, which helps deepen my own understanding.

Title: 2001–2007 | Lack & Longing
Original title: 2001–2007 | LACK & LONGING
Author: Lorenzo Castore
ISBN: 978-3-16-148410-0
Publisher: L’Artiere Edizioni

It began with a chance encounter: Koudelka’s Exiles exhibition changed the course of Italian photographer Lorenzo Castore’s career.

He was only nineteen at the time. Born in Florence, he had moved to New York City after finishing high school.

“It was a staggering revelation: seeing that one could photograph reality, and work with it, by giving it an almost surreal form,” he says. From that moment, Castore longed to discover what he should do. Koudelka’s photographs inspired him to create images that could each stand on their own while together forming a distinctive narrative.

That ambition also drove the artist to publish his latest work, 2001–2007 | Lack & Longing, the second volume of his long-term project The Labyrinth of Time.

Castore is known for books including Nero, Paradise, The Last Residence, Ewa & Piotr, and House of Light, which he describes as “thematic works.”

Lack & Longing, however, like every work in The Labyrinth of Time, takes a different approach. “This is a very specific kind of photographic autobiography, not a diary. It is closer to a literary autobiography, in which fiction and reality somehow merge.”

For Castore, a project of editing and sequencing like this needs time to accumulate, setting it apart from the immediacy of a diary:

“Back then, I simply kept my head down and took pictures, without any particular aim. Now I look back through the archive and think about what I lived through in those years.”

The sudden death of a close friend prompted him to reflect deeply on the vast body of photographs he had previously struggled to understand.

As Castore explains, the loss set “many things moving in my head, my heart, and my gut.” He adds, “When anything could happen at any moment, shaping this archive demanded an enormous effort from me.”